TSAI

FREE-INDIRECT STYLE: AUSTEN AND JOYCE

Irony, as we have noted, produces and implies aesthetic distance: we imagine some authorial point of judgement that is other than the voice expressed. But the stylistic implications and complications of this distance also lead beyond irony. If it is the case that an author or speaker can be other than what they manifestly say, it is also the case that complex forms of irony can make the recognition and existence of this distanced authorial position impossible to determine. It may be the case that the text resists a clearly elevated or distanced position from the discourse it expresses. What is implied, not said or other than the narration, is not some clearly perceived ironic position that ‘we’ might recognise, for such a point of elevated recognition is precisely what the structure of the text seeks to destroy.

Modernist free-indirect style moves well beyond the clear location of irony and earlier uses of what is now identified as free-indirect discourse. We might say that Austen had already used free-indirect style in Pride and Prejudice (1813), describing characters in the elevated, manufactured and obsequious tones they would themselves use. But we would also have to say that while Austen herself never speaks in the novel, all the voices and the dialogues that characters maintain with each other allow a social whole to emerge, where some characters speak with a sense of the social whole, and others merely repeat received values. Austen presents two styles of dialogue: characters who do nothing more than voice received opinions (including characters, such as Mr Bennett who continues to look at his wife as an object of ridicule and satire). Other characters, by contrast, speak with an openness to others, not merely judging what they say, but allowing their actions and character to fill out a picture of personhood that lies beyond mere speech. It is the narrative of the novel, the structured description of actions, places and the changes of human relations that allows certain voices to be seen as sincere and open, and others to be seen as mere rhetoric and dissimulation. The plot allows some characters to emerge as those who have been capable of insight and development, while others remain within the style of repetition and received ideas through which they were originally described.

Austen’s use of voices and dialogue is centred in some grounding value: the value of social dialogue and exchange itself, as opposed to merely received and repeated values. Her good characters alter their opinions and values when presented with contrary events; they speak with a view both to self-reflection and self-renewal, admitting that there is more to life than merely adhering to what one says. Good sense and character are social and stylistic. Characters with a sense of the social whole allow their moral discourse to alter, expose itself to definition and articulate questions of how one ought to speak (Oldmark 1981, 2). Both Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy develop an awareness of their place in the community and a recognition of the effects of their own speech. By contrast, Austen presents characters who are nothing more than rigid repetitions of style: Mr Bennett’s satire, Mr Collins’s pomposity and Lady de Burgh’s ritual propriety. Such characters cling to their own personality and style of speech as if it were nothing more than a social role or a play; they have no sense of creating themselves in relation to others, or of acting in ways that go beyond mere social rule and expectation. Jane Austen’s use of free-indirect style is ironic; she speaks in the language of characters and their received morality, but she also allows a higher point of view through characters who speak sincerely with a sense of moral discourse as dialogue and question, rather than fashion or truths ‘universally acknowledged’.

Modernist free-indirect discourse, by contrast, is not grounded in character. Style itself speaks, with characters becoming effects rather than authors of language. The early stories of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), for example, problematise the moral tradition of irony, which traditionally generates a position of judgement above the limits of context or discourse. Not only do the stories allow for a high modernist ironic reading, which would place the reader and author in an elite and impersonal point of judgement above the commodified and machine-like voices of everyday life, they also allow for a postmodern irony, where discourses are presented as forces in their own right, as though language circulated with its own energy and power of transformation. There is no position from which narration emerges, no impersonal or ineffable point of pure creativity that maintains itself only as a principle of style and creation. Rather, narrations are effects of the collision of text; speakers are points through which language or text passes. ‘Text’ expands from being language to include all the noises, accidents, forces and traces of life.

Consider Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’, which is written from the first-person point of view of a young boy who plays truant with his friends in order to embark on an ‘adventure’. Because the story is written in the first person it is not, strictly speaking, an example of free-indirect style, which usually adopts the idiom and style of a character in the third person. But Joyce’s first-person, or the ‘I’ of narration, is already invaded by impersonal voices. Not only does the story speak as though a moralising adult were describing his experiences as a child—‘A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived’—this adult voice is itself derived from popular culture (Joyce [1914] 1992, 11). The story not only mentions that the boys read ‘The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel’; the describing voice also speaks in the tone of ‘boys’ own’ adventures: the escapade is referred to as an ‘adventure’; the boy refers to other boys flinging stones ‘out of chivalry’; they arrange a ‘siege’; they carry ‘provisions’; and refer to Leo Dillon as a ‘funk’. The narrating adult voice is already that of a circulated discourse, and already the stylised, rather than actual, repetition of the child’s point of view. The narrator is not a transparent subject viewing a world so much as a series of received voices and notions. The recollection is never fully aware of what it is saying; the voice is traversed by boy’s slang (‘skit’, ‘miching’, ‘josser’), the moralising tone of boy’s literature, and the upright bourgeois, but ‘liberal’ (ibid. 17) dismissal of popular culture:Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary…’(ibid. 12).

At the heart of the story is an unstated event, a suggestion that the boys see the old man masturbating:

—I say! Look what he’s doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahoney exclaimed again:

—I say… He’s a queer old josser!

(Joyce [1914] 1992, 18)

In not viewing or describing the event, the voice of narration is itself exposed as partial, silent, suggestive of ‘indecency’, but deprived of the power to say what is being experienced or happening. The voice is limited precisely because of its propriety, its inability to see the invasion of the child’s happy world by the sexualising adult. As the story progresses the adult’s sexual intrusion and the sexual delight of the adult adopting the voice of the boy is made explicit. The ‘old josser’ talks to the boys of ‘sweethearts’, adopting a boy’s viewpoint, taking a delight in the description of infant eroticism:

He began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they hadand how soft their hands were and how all girls were not so good asthey seemed to be if only one knew.

(Joyce [1914] 1992, 18)

Both boys’ literature and the ‘strangely liberal’ voice of the old man prohibit child sexuality, but the description of what is prohibited enables the voice to repeat, imagine and eroticise the child’s point of view; there is a pornographic pleasure taken in the very discourse of punishment, and the imagination of transgression:

He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre. He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping … He said that if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls. And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that.

(Joyce [1914] 1992, 19)

There is no longer a strict border between the moralising voice of boys’ literature, which enjoys its judgement and proprietorial view of boys, and the sexually violent imagination of the old man. What is displayed, in ‘An Encounter’, is the prurient delight of the voice of elevation and punishment, the enjoyment and sadism of moralism. Further, the child is himself caught up in this world of received voices, blindly repeating the discourse that he finds disturbing but that he can neither free himself from nor understand. In seeking the old man’s approval, in wanting to be acknowledged and admired by the moralising sadism, the boy pretends to have read books that are, for him, merely mentioned names (Joyce [1914] 1992, 17). The narration is not an ironic voice that elevates itself above corruption; the act of elevation or judgement itself is corrupt, stifling and intrusive: both the adult voice of the story describing the adventure and the old man’s delight that ‘Every boy…has a sweetheart’ (ibid. 17). The discourses of morality are, in Dubliners, shown to be productive of a paralysing and blind moralism that is trapped within its enjoyment of a pleasure that can only be suggested through cliché, innuendo and slang. Any reader of this story who feels that the corruption is an object, and that the sexuality is there to be viewed, has missed the force of the narration. In order to read or perceive the sexual allusion one has to interpret or decode the sexual message; unlike the narrative voice, which remains blind, the reader can see the sexual sense; in so doing it is the reader who, like the old man, reads an erotic sense into the world of boys and sweethearts and ‘nice warm whipping’ (ibid. 19).